f13.net

Rather than derail the WoW thread where the topic of RP came up, I figured I'd post here. Lantyssa and I can't be the only roleplayers (or former roleplayers) around here, so I'm gonna post old RP anecdotes and such in hopes of soliciting some from others. I don't care what game they're from, but you can already guess where all of mine take place.


This is from maybe 2007. Guy sitting on the bench with the bald head and red shoulders is me. Guy with the little blue health bar under him is an EA event moderator assigned to facilitate RP and hold custom events on that shard. The people around the table from him are "big shot noble" roleplayers representing the cities placed under invasion by a then-ongoing event. Crowd (half of which is off-screen here) is a mix of roleplayers and the general public.

The actual invasion event was a major EA every-shard thing, but the moderators were authorized to tailor it to each shard's community through lesser supporting events and such. The players playing nobles did a really good job of squabbling and blaming everything on one another while the "royal representative" (EA guy) facepalmed and the crowd heckled. Seeing some of the general non-roleplayers get wrapped up enough to start yelling from the crowd that they were being idiots for not teaming up against a common threat was pretty fun.

That's how I ended up on the bench. The EA guy thought my ranting from the crowd was good enough that he had me come up and wait so I could address the gathering. I forget exactly what I said, but once the whole meeting was over, the crowd basically flipped the big shots the bird and went "The hell with you guys, we'll save the day ourselves, yaa!" and went off to attack the monsters.

Which was great, because this wasn't just some "spawn monsters in town for a month until a GM turns it off" thing. The event was coded such that the monsters could be pushed back through the town (spawn points shutting off in turn if enough were killed, or reactivating if they were let off the hook) and eventually driven from the town completely once enough had been killed to spawn the boss. I think we cleared Vesper that day, I can't remember exactly.

Really some of the best "worldness" I've seen in an MMO, and one of the game's high points for me.

Anyway, I want to hear out of someone else. If you don't have any good RP stories, tell me some bad ones. That dude trying to RP a hybrid elf/demon/saiyan ninja who wouldn't stop trying to kill you with emotes. That "girl" who turned out to be a guy, and the half dozen cybernerds who had to quit the game in shame at having fought over who got to sex0r some fat old man. That shit never gets old.

I'm logged into WoW right now and some dude in Stormwind is trying to sell his "wife" for 50 silver or something. I should buy her and see if I can make her mine copper for me.

I don't have any really big RP stories, but I'll have to say UO was the only MMO I've been able to really sit down and RP (or at least act in-character) in. There was one tavern in the urban sprawl north of Minoc I'd bounce for a lot, and it involved a lot of in-character discussions with people either trying to get in, or people who were inside and being unruly. Pre-Trammel, naturally, otherwise those interactions would have had no point.

But as far as bad RP goes? Just load up a City of Heroes trial and zone into the Pocket D on Virtue. Go up to the hero-side bar, stand there, and read local chat. It ranges from amazingly bad soap-opera drama to pretty skeezy sex talk. Funny enough, I've seen next to no people talk IC in actual teams. They're content to just /walllean in the D and spout exposition with all the other douchebags with stupid "real" names.

I've met a few on Virtue that are IC even during Hami raids :awesome_for_real:

/walllean at 5 FPS.

We used to run events in Dark Age of Camelot, these would be scripted events that took the players from a realm on an adventure for a few hours. There'd be NPCs in one of the cities telling players about some horrible thing that was happening Right The Fuck Now, a leader character that was usually played by a GM or a volunteer and, when we had a critical mass of players milling around at the leader character, we'd set off and do the event. Scripting these events was a lot of work, we ran an event every two weeks, rotating between the realms in turn and it took about that long to write, test, debug and translate the event scripts, stuff that didn't have to be scripted was therefore preferred.

We'd been running a set of adventures that borrowed an epic dungeon from one realm and opened it up (with custom mobs and custom loot drops) to a different realm and this particular week it was the turn of Hibernia to get their realm event. We had an adventure written where an eEeEEevil wizard was introducing unnatural creatures (young griffons) into Hibernia and the druid council were upset because this was disturbing the balance in the land. There was an NPC vendor who was selling these items just outside of the main city in Hy Brasil and if you interacted with him, he'd give youa  spiel about how he was getting leant on by the Druids and had been tricked into selling these things in the first place. A chief druid (played by volunteers) showed up and told players that they needed to sort this out before too much damage was done and gave the players a flying beetle ride to the place where the evil wizard lived. This was Tuscaren Glacier, the Midgardian epic dungeon. Once inside, the players had to battle through a bunch of encounters until they reached the end boss, a huge animated suit of armour. They killed it and the wizard's assistant, a Lurikeen (played by me) appeared in the wreckage.

THis part was supposed to just be a roleplay wrap up to the event, the players would tell me off, I'd promise to be good, hand out some rewards and send them home. I played the Lurikeen as extremely untrustworthy and contradicted myself under cross examination multiple times. I gave the players every reason to mistrust me as I happily told very obvious lies about everything. The players asked me where the griffons came from and I told them the wizard bred all kinds of animals and I had decided to sell them to make some money while he was away (originally this money was to help orphans, then later in response to a different question it was to pay for a holiday for my poor, sick mother). Naturally the players asked what other animals he bred and if these were for sale. I thought a bit and then claimed that he had some dragon eggs and that I could sell them some dragons when they hatched. No they weren't hatched yet, no the players couldn't see them however if they paid for them now I'd magically be able to deliver them when they did hatch in about a month. The players asked how much so I came out with the outrageous amount of two platinum each (which was a lot of money in early SI days). The players actually formed a line to give me their money. I took a load of platinum off the players then sent them all home.
 
The next day we ran a story on the main site in the form of a wanted poster for my Lurikeen issued by the druid council of Hibernia. It listed my crimes in some detail. The players realised that they'd been defrauded and (mostly) thought it was hilarious. A fortnight later we ran a follow up event where the players had to track down my character by following some clues to find some of my associates hidden around Hibernia. Eventually they captured me and put me on trial. We had arranged for one of our volunteers to play the Druid who would be presiding and he formed a jury of players from the mob who'd captured me. Another volunteer played various defence witnesses (I edited his event character on the fly several times to give him different names and different skins), these were all variously untrustworthy and included a Firbolg (mortal enemies of the realm), a Kobold arms-dealer who was a business partner of mine and finally my mother who turned out to be even less trustworthy than me. The players wanted to execute me but Celtic Fist, the biggest Hib RvR guild at the time came down en masse and invited me into their guild. There was then a long and fully roleplayed argument between a bunch of hardcore RvR bunnies who normally had no time at all for that kind of thing and the rest of the players at my trial. CF insisted that I was subject to their protection as a member of their guild and the rest of the players argued that I was clearly a threat to Hibernia, a traitor, a thief and so forth. The event that was supposed to take about an hour ended up taking 4 hours and I had to walk home from work afterwards because I missed the last tram home. Eventually the players reached a compromise where I'd give everyone their money back and be exiled from Hibernia for ever. To date, those two weeks of roleplay on the forums and our official news page bookended by the two realm events is the best roleplay experience I've ever had in an MMO.

That's awesome, had no idea DAOC did stuff like that.

I used to be a pretty hardcore RPer in UO and SWG. Then I got better.  :awesome_for_real:

Amazingly enough, SWG had the most memorable moments, even though I was never much into Star Wars (I've only seen ep 1 and 4).

A few stories off the top of my head:

Back in the 'glory days', I played a mad-scientisty doctor in the Moenia and Coronet med centers with truckloads of speech macros (mostly about clinical trials, experimental medicine and crap). When people RP'd back (rarely), I buffed them too. Once I met a spice dealer in the med center who got the good doctor hooked on neutron pixie, which lead to some amusing situations later on. Law enforcement RPers also questioned me in a while while looking for the spicer, but Doc don't snitch, so that was that.

My guild (though I haven't joined them at that point yet) had an RP player city on the Kettemoor server called Greenmurk and we had an amateur theater troupe with a band, dancers and all, who wrote a play called "The Death of a Jedi", a sort-of reimagination of SW ep1. They had some memorable performances (mostly in Theed); however, one of the lead actors held a grudge against the main antagonist for a long while [character backstory thing]. At the last performance, the protagonist left the stage for ~5 seconds before the epic swordfighting scene, and exchanged his prop sword for a real one. The antagonist realized this too late to get away, and was incapped + got a deathblow; the play ended abruptly with everyone being stunned and the protagonist making his escape from the theater. Here (http://jademoon.org/gallery/displayimage.php?album=5&pos=109) is a screenshot of the pivotal moment, though it was taken with my POS pentium 2 with every single graphical slider set to minimum. Here (http://jademoon.org/gallery/displayimage.php?album=5&pos=111) is a pic taken during the actual swordfight with better image quality. The beauty of it all was that basically only the protagonist+antagonist knew about the setup, even the other actors were dumbfounded!


(I'll probably edit more cool-story-bro moments into this post when I remember them :p)

When I was in SWG a bunch of us were sitting around on the Lowca forums bemoaning how it used to be so much more fun when we were newbies blah blah declension narrative etc...

So I organised an event on the forest moon of Endor (pretty deadly location), with the premise that a bunch of us had been in a shuttle crash and had come out of it only with the ship's emergency supplies: CDFE weapons, some basic meds and the like.  We met up on the moon and had to make it from the crash location to the starport with only what we had.  It took ages, and several deaths, and everyone had stacks of black on their HAM bars due to the amount of poison in Endor, but it was pretty fun nonetheless.  A very long, tense run with a more coherent premise and storyline than Lost.

I was an old school MUSHer in the mid-90s with people (over half severely damaged) who thought typing chat text was the highest art form in the world. When I logged onto UO and EQ the first time I thought RP was the norm in each. I was mistaken and I've never gone back. The End.

When I was roleplaying a (non-combat) bard on Atlantic I participated in some of the town council meetings and other events that went on in the Yew area at the time. Was great to be part of (for a short while anyway) a roleplaying-community that actually got built up ingame through meetings and discussions and player-run events.

After Europa launched I moved there to roleplay characters of a more shady nature. Started out as a regular thief in the cities (not much RP went on there, but had some nice encounters with some players roleplaying guards), went on to educate players about the dangers of handing over all your best gear to "smiths" with "scoundrel" reputations for repairs, then turned to the highroads to waylay the people who actually still used them. It's strange how many people who don't actually hand over their boots, a few gold coins or another cheap item to you when you pop up in the middle of the road threatning them in combat-mode, but instead take off running (only to get a deadly poisoned kryss in their back). :P

Also had a blast while living in the RP-town Deepwater, with all the storylines that people came up with and ran with, the conflicts with the orcs and yew militia, trials, events like circuses, fight-clubs and grand feasts, etc.

UO's world and gameplay suited itself extremely well to roleplaying, player-run events and finding stuff to do that did not involve killing the latest "raid boss" for epic lootsz. Much better so than any other MMOG I've played since. :(

The best RP events I ever did were in Neverweinter Nights for sure.  I've got boatloads of great stories, but most of my favorites involve playing on the City of Arabel server and being a part of some big on going plotlines with the noble houses in the city.  I got myself hired as a guard for one of the houses and later ended up representing the house in a duel with another player from a different house to settle a dispute between the lords.   

Of course, the thing with NWN, and with your story WUA is that there was DM intervention and specific events designed and run with the idea of RP, or at least the game world in mind.  Nowadays when you think of RP is just a bunch of people sitting around talking and never really DOING anything.  That stereotype has emerged, in my opinion, because if you want to RP in a current generation MMORPG, what you say and what you wear and pretty much the only control you have over things that actually get represented in the game world.  Everything you kill respawns, every instance you clear is immediately repopulated, and so forth.  Its just damn hard to "RP" when the game world is so static, and you just can't get that sort of dynamic game world without DM intervention.

If an RP guild could role play wanting to go clear out a system of caves and make it their new base or something, they'd be ALL OVER THAT as long as after clearing the caves, they could actually stay there and set up camp.  The best you could do now is head out there, kill a bunch of stuff and then pretend on your own private forums that you have a base there. 

Lastly, this is why I actually feel like EVE has a decent amount of RP.  Not that most of the people would call themselves RPers, but the actions of the player and the actions of the character basically line up so well most of the time that it feels very in character.  When you say something over Corp chat like "How much is X going for in Jita" and it sparks a discussion about where the best place in the galaxy is to buy or sell X, its not RP per se, but in some ways it sort of is, and its one of the reasons I get totally obsessed with that game when I play it.

I think SWG was actually fairly nice for pen-and-paper-style sessions as well. We held some very in-depth ones, like:
- a timed mission taking the group of players all over the galaxy: they had to solve puzzles (both narrated by the 'DM' and from various emails / house furnishing descriptions / etc), explore an abandoned outpost, infiltrate an imperial NPC base, and finally fight their way to the middle of the 'Warren' dungeon. While doing this, we actually met some imperial players at the imperial NPC base which made the encounter that much more spicy. Oh yeah, they didn't make the timer by the end, but still everyone was happy and said "this was the most fun I ever had while failing a mission".  :why_so_serious:
- an investigative murder mystery in a multi-building estate with various clues scattered about and the killer still at large (and getting a few extra victims as the night went on). It wasn't the butler, but close enough!

Of course these all took an insane amount of setup time and not everything was possible due to the lack of actual DM powers (as bad as SWG is, it would be a lot easier to do these events now with the quest maker and world-decoration functionality). In retrospect, it would've been easier to just tell the story via a digital p&p program like openrpg or fantasy grounds, but there was a certain charm of tromping around in a "world" during the events.

I have trouble recalling any specific events, especially this early in the morning.  Mwerevu has been my partner in crime over several games, and we love just messing around while being in character.  (Vu could probably recount endless stories.)

My favorite though had to be in CoH.  The character which ended up sticking was kind of a joke, a Tanker named Jersey Girl, based on a cow theme.  The Liberty (Cow) Bell icon was her chest emblem.  Dumb, innocent, and very sheltered by her 'villanous' father, the Mad Cow King.  She'd rail against Hero Burger in public areas while Vu tried to explain they didn't serve cow heroes for dinner.

I also played with people who asked her where in New Jersey was she from (Jersey is a breed of cow originating from the Isle of Jersey).  Seriously, I averaged at least one tell a week asking me this question.  I think only two people got it once explained.

Possibly the most interesting encounter was when Jersey hopped onto a train platform and this other 8' tall cow hero was standing there.  Except for hair and an accessory or two, they were the spitting image of one another.  We played around with that chance meeting for a while.  Her name -- Deja Moo.

I think SWG was the only game I RP'd in, I don't think I have time to just sit and chat or do in game politics anymore. Does reading people their rights in APB before arresting count?  :grin:

I don't rp myself, but playing on CoH's Virtue server recently I've have had a few people rp their chars during groups and I've played along. Nothing that slowed things down, just them making comments in character. One guy whose character had two personalities one cynical, one naive. He switched once and he did a good with it and a few people in the group went along with him when the naive persona woke up halfway through the task force.

Neverwinter Nights was the big one for me.  I played and eventually DM'ed in some persistent world and it was interesting how my character evolved from a cliche - lost girl with memory problems - into an interesting and unique character, which paved the way for another character.  I wish I could remember the details of various stories, but all I can really recall after all this time are some of the general events that happened.

What I most recall were some of the plots I DM'ed.  I remember this one-shot adventure that eventually kicked off a whole scheme going off in the background.  Made it up almost entirely off-the-cuff because it was early morning and one or two other players were on, so I wanted to give them something to do.  They started discovering people horribly butchered all over town, and traced it back to the head priest NPC of...Torm, I think it was.  Which seemed very odd cause the guy of course was good and had never shown hints of doing anything like this.  It all led to some weird maze outside town where a truly bizarre collection of monsters had suddenly sprouted.  I recall the RP as they argued about what was going on and how odd this was, until they ran into the NPC priest and started questioning him, but what he was saying didn't add up, so they were getting more suspicious until the NPC then turned into some kind of demon and attacked them.  I can't recall how I worked it out exactly but there was an odd gimmick to the fight that they had to figure out before they could beat it.  When they finally did, they suddenly woke up back in town, feeling the aftereffects of a complex psionic mind-trap.  As I recall, it was all focused around some object they had discovered in town, something I had thrown in a few days ago as something that was at the time meaningless, but I found a use for later.

Eventually the whole thing spiraled on into a long-running plot involving illithids who never actually appeared on screen, cause there were no illithid models, so they were always acting through agents or by psionically manipulating people, and boy do I wish I could remember all the details of those RP's, cause they really got interesting.  Plus the whole thing created a distinct aura of fear throughout the entire population of the game, cause everyone started questioning each others' motivations and whether or not things were real.

I really miss that PSW.  I can't recall why I quit playing, but having stopped was one of the things I regret quite a bit, to this day.

What features in an MMG do you find to encourage roleplay?

There was a discussion article on Massively about this last week, but the responses were largely useless ("Ventrilo voice fonts!" "toy items!").

User empowering tools.

Hate to keep going on about SWG, but its storyteller features and quest creator are actually pretty neat (they'd be better if they weren't grind-locked though). The huge open world of SWG along with user-placable structures and decorations also helped a lot. Too bad that the game sucks.  :grin:

Honestly, other than UO/SWG and (not very much) COH, I haven't RP'd in a MMOG; imo level-based games are RP poison (especially since most of the world in a diku is for leveling and occasional farming, nothing else). Blah blah virtual worlds vs games, etc.

fake edit: COH's Mission Architect is a great tool (player-made story arcs can be really awesome... as expected, most are terrible) and better than SWG's equivalent for actual gameplay, but it's not that useful for RP.

I'd say the ability to create my own quest NPCs and stuff would have helped a lot.

The best RP I've seen was also in SWG where a guy roleplayed a former mining kingpin who lost his ass in a smuggling operation and had to rebuild from scratch. He set up a huge trading bazzar for materials in his guild's player city with all the different items laid out perfectly. I ended up working for the character as one of his mining associates, and he would stage regular events in the town for bands and contests to promote huge sales. It wasn't a big RP community, but this guy and his associates were pretty funny.

Ryzom Ring:

http://www.vimeo.com/1607496

http://www.vimeo.com/1607628

http://www.vimeo.com/1607416

1) Ability to alter or control areas of the game world (or as Bloodworth said, user empowering tools).

2) Fewer quests, rather than more quests.  What quests there are should live up to the name quests, should take a long time, and actually be important.  

3) Ability to toggle PvP for individual players (or free for all PvP)

4) A non static game world with non static NPC factions.

5) Ability to advance in the game through non-combat means

6) Probably the biggest one, but also the least viable - Smaller server communities with actual enforced RP.  I'd prefer a lower budget game graphically, as long as it has the infrastructure to support the kind of gameplay that matters.


Along with number 6 - Its pretty hard to add RP viability as a tack on because quite frankly, a lot of the stuff that makes for great RP is easily exploitable and could ruin a game if it was flooded with non-RPers.  This is one of the reason NWN persistent world servers were so good.  You broke the rules, acted like a jerk, or just generally weren't playing in the spirit that server wanted to promote, you were just out (and this was at least somewhat offset by the fact that there were multiple big RP PW Story servers with communities that preferred different things).

RP in large scale isn't going to work casually. Big LARPs barely work and the players in those are all very motivated RPers as they've spent a lot of money, time and effort on it.

To be straight, I think it's purely idealistic to think that more than 5 RPers in one place is going to consistently work out, regardless of supporting toolset. In other words, I think the best tools for RPing would let players to instance and segment the world freely, so that they can stage a small scenario easily (need an inn? Crop out a bit of land around an existing one) and invite a limited number of players. These segments can be stripped of all XP and loot and optionally mobs.

Once those tools exist, they would simplify adding other, more powerful tools, such as custom NPCs and similar things, as those tools in turn would only be able to alter the segmented area rather than the game world directly.

I don't know.  As others have said, user empowering tools, but I can't see this working in a large-population game with servers of five to ten thousand people.  But if something along the lines of the NWN DM client could be made available to people it would work.

With all the instancing these days, maybe the ability to spin off your own instances as a DM, and gain complete control inside your instanced area.  Have each player get a limited number of instances as a DM, each with as much control as possible over as much as possible inside it.  I think the biggest key important factor in many ways is the ability to make a difference.  To change the world in some meaningful way, not just your character.  Whether that means building a temple to your god, killing the dragon and having it actually be dead (and thus stop raiding villages) or enacting a two-year plan to replace the king in a coup involving a copious quantity of butterscotch pudding, being able to make an actual lasting change on the world that everyone else sees and acknowledges is what makes it good.

Quests shouldn't really be automated.  Especially not available to everyone and their brother.  Infact, quests, as the mechanic we have come to experience in MMOG's are pretty out of place.  Only a few repetitive tasks make much sense for quests.  Mostly delivery type stuff that needs to be completed regularly.  But those are about the only automated quests I see being a good idea if you're trying to focus on RP.  Quests like 'kill x amount of monster x' are stupid because they don't accomplish a specific goal and don't make sense, quests that do accomplish a specific goal 'drive the goblins away from their camp at location x' can only be accomplished once if you want it to make sense - and a world that makes sense is key for actually focusing on RP, in my opinion.

But all of this is why I say I don't know about doing it in a large-population game.  Stuff like this works in a game with 50-150 players.  Maybe even up to two or three hundred.  But beyond that?  I doubt it.  What Malakili says about small communities and enforced RP is spot on.  If you're not very proactive about kicking out people who disrupt the RP or abuse the tools put in place to improve the RP, it's not going to work very well.  And since different RPers often prefer different styles, there can't even be a one-size-fits-all answer to that question, either, which is why letting the user change things is key.

Personally, I feel as though the NWN model could really have gone places.  Still could.  Set it up with a lot more server support and such, charge people a fee to have their worlds hosted on the server, including all custom content needed in order to play (see .hak files for NWN, for instance) and make the process of joining someone's world as painless as possible for the user, having the necessary content downloaded automatically.  The right revenue model for this could potentially be quite successful, I think.

I'd like to subscribe to your news letter. :Love_Letters:

Player housing
Player driven economy, where items are made, repaired, etc by the players.
PvP
Small population.
Successful characters who are not combat oriented.

Yeah I definitely had multiple random grouping experiences with people who never left character on Virtue. Like this one girl (?) who was roleplaying a broken robot, and *every single thing she said* was accompanied by some emote about what she was doing with her antennae.

My favorite CoX/Virtue RPer was this hero whose name I forget (started with an A ... Ascendant maybe?) who would park at a phone booth by one of the tram stations (augh, I forget which one, it's been too long since I've played) and RP talking to his agent. He was hilarious.

There was also the single time I experienced any RP in Dark Age of Camelot. We were dicking around on some RP server as Mids (I forget why, probably to play Mid with some Igraine people who were non-Mids) and wound up having a big conversation about class balance, but in the context of the game. I seem to recall our RP stranger thinking Thor must be a giant pussy if thanes were anything to go on, and Ingmar being appalled at this blasphemy.

I'm not a big RPer, but my characters always have at least a skeleton background that I can play off of if someone starts roll playing at me.  About the only RP that I ever did unprompted was to start selling pies during the weekly PVP tournaments that used to be held on one of the UO shards.  I figured that every tournament needed someone selling dodgy pies.

This, for me too. The ability to organise things, even very small things for very small groups of people, that give them a chance to roleplay. It could be as basic as allowing people to choose where to go for their next adventure rather than pushing them to do certain quests/dungeons in a certain order. It could be allowing them to build a tavern, hold a festival etc.

In my experience, roleplaying in games that don't allow players freedom tends to devolve into people sitting around and telling stories (badly, in my case) in between actually playing the game, and eventually fades away.
 
Players don't roleplay when they are simply doing quests pushed on them by the NPCs, no matter how well written the NPC dialogue is or how good the story written by the devs. They have to be given space to make up their own lousy stories and then to actually play out those stories, to an extent at least, rather than simply being able to talk about them in olde English.

I miss Deepwater too, and the rivalry we had with the other big roleplaying town Spiritwood, however silly it was;)

Ascendant's phone calls were very funny and made good use of CoH/V's macro program.

They are long, but I've found two below. They'd go out on the local channel, meaning you could walk in on them part way through when you went to the tram.

The devs even made an official joke of it when some NPCs respond to wrong numbers.



Funnily enough, one of the very first RP guilds on CoH (started during beta) took advantage of the character creator in the same way and developed the Insane Cow Posse. All cow characters with cow pun names.

Wat?


In it's heyday my RP guild would have two-dozen people on at once by itself, and that was in UO circa 2004, a game with almost no non-soloable PVE content much less raids or something to draw people together. We'd have RP/PVP fights that easily involved anywhere from thirty to fifty combatants altogether.

The things the game had that facilitated RP were...

A) Guild wars: These allowed players to dictate the nature and scope of their own conflicts. In general every RP guild would "war" every other RP guild in order to create an isolated community that was "open PVP" within itself. A bunch of adventurers could get into a giant bar fight, the guards could chase and attack troublemakers, large guilds could fight organized battles with each other, and so forth. If a guild was abusing this system, the others could just declare peace and leave them sitting there with nobody to fight.

B) Housing: This one is pretty obvious. It was always nice to be able to have your own headquarters to hang out in or for your enemies to attack, to be able to hold gatherings that weren't open to the general public, etc.

C) Fast travel: If it's going to take 15 minutes of riding and/or flying to get to where your guildmates physically are, then another 15 minutes of travel to get back to whatever you were doing, nobody is going to bother. Thus you end up with these jokes of RP guilds in WoW where they pretend hearthstones are walkie-talkies and make /g an in-character channel.

How about the ability to control your appearance and look of your gear (to suite a theme) without totally gimping yourself.

I enjoyed running around UO as a cranky old Druid in a robe, with his pack of loyal Grizzlies defending him. Not something I could have replicated in WoW.

I agree with Mal. Second Life has some vibrant rp communities. They also have boxing and football and combat leagues.   

My only real roleplaying was also on Virtue.  I made some Soviet-looking hero (mind-control and radiation, of course) and was merrily moving around the city when I ran into another Soviet-looking hero named Communist.  We immediately joined up for a mission and this dude Never Broke Character Ever.  It was hilarious.  Every time we got a Nazi mission it was full on KILL THE FASCIST SCUM, COMRADE!, always shouting and carrying on.  We, that evening, made a Soviet-themed supergroup and it was glorious!  We gathered up ever Russian-looking hero we could find and held rallies at the Liberty statue and Communist was always leading the way.

And then, like a week later, he vanished off the face of the earth, and it all sorta fell apart.  They removed the Nazis later anyway, so I guess it was for the best.  On one of the welcome-back weeks, I logged in and our supergroup consisted of me and Communist [last login 500-something days ago].

I always wonder if the secret police got poor Communist.  I'll vouch for him!  He was a good party member.

You're talking about a different thing. What you're talking about is having a clique that plays together, much like my LARP analogy. The entire point of RPing in an MMO in my mind, however, is the spontaneous RP that happens with people you don't know too well. As long as the group is small enough, the "needs" of each player can be reasonably met through compromise in order for all to enjoy themselves, but as the group grows, this will become much, much harder.

I've had as many RP moments ruined in MMOs by RPers as by drooling retards. Most I imagine were well-meaning and just wanted to have some fun but their RP "style" has clashed horribly with the rest of the group (some want to play farmhands, others dragonslayers... these two things rarely mix well.) Someone on this board likened MMO RP to "an orchestra without a conductor" et c., which I've found to be true. It only really enjoyable when the group is small enough.

There is a fairly well-known position held by many in Eve that just about everything we do in Eve is RP (I think that it is known by some in the Amarr RP camp as "The Aralis Doctrine" but I could be wrong on the name of the senior Amarr person involved there).  Certainly Eve has an unusually large and influential "formal" RP sector, and I've sat in enough alliance forums, IRC servers and jabber channels (friendly and hostile) to know that the way that people discuss the great 0.0 - and often lowsec and empire war - conflicts is essentially RPing.

So I'd say that formal tools are unnecessary if you have the little matter of a world where player interaction and combat actually matters.

I help run a LARP system that runs a continuous, player-driven campaign throughout the year (and has done for over fifteen years now) that routinely gets 5000+ players at the main events. I was also an officer in a full RP guild on DAoC that numbered more than 100 regular players and would routinely have 50 or 60 on at a time, this was a guild with strict rules about OOC in open chats as well not just a 'you have to write a backstory to get in' guild, it was also on a platform that had no official RP servers.

So, uh, we're agreeing? :?

For motivated RPers a chatbox will take them 80% of the way, as can be witnessed from simply reading this thread - people have RPed no matter how unsuitable the platform. I don't think that's the point. I'm looking at something that makes RP convenient and feasible with little preparation, i.e. fun for the less hardcore. Essentially, something that makes RP nearly as easy to do as running a five-man dungeon in WoW after the introduction of the LFD tool. To that goal, isolation is going to be a huge help, just like it is when dungeoncrawling. Which also was a big part of the success of NWN as an RP platform (no less than two people have recently pointed out how nice it was to be able to simply ban annoying people.)

Basically, OOC is a much more fundamental problem for consistent RP than lack of housing or any such superficiality is, because RP can't be efficiently enforced like game rules can. The fundamental problem with OOC in turn is that everyone has different ideas of what constitutes OOC. Add to that that some people don't want to RP all the time. I think enabling people to make their own "rulesets" through isolation is a good thing as long as it's non-permanent.

This is actually my main problem with RPing in most MMOGs.  Frankly, its probably closer to 100% (especially given things like what WUA said and using /g for in character stuff).  The game itself doesn't even matter anymore for most RP guilds because the game gives them nothing.  There are some exceptions out there, but they are few and far between.   When nothing that you are RPing is actually represented in the game world, it soon becomes tiresome, at least to my mind. When I look back at my RP in any MMO post - WoW I literally could have done the same things in an IRC channel.

The reason I don't RP in WoW, and I'm less likely to bother in other mass games, is it's something which needs to be taught and these games don't encourage learning those skills all.  When everyone's idea of RP is "I'm the secret prince, son of Wrynn and Jaina, who battled Illidan to a draw at age 10" I shut down.

Case in point:  my old guild on Kirin Tor admitted a guy named Inuyyasha.  (The GM didn't know where it was from.)  One of our few rules was no character rip-offs.  He insisted up and down he wasn't, then proceeded to tell us how he was half demon, wore a red robe, had a big sword that turned into a rusty katana, etc., when asked to give a bit of background.  While the most extreme case I've seen, more often than not people fell into these lines.

It just seems it's the nature of things when nothing is done to encourage RP by the game operators.  Or actively discourage in some cases.  When I came back after a long break, the guild was all about raiding and RP couldn't be seen anywhere.  Unless you enjoy being the person who never breaks character while stuck in an out-of-place scene, it's disheartening.

No, it's just that nobody can figure out what the fuck you're talking about.


Unless by "work out" you mean "randomly occur in every major population center in a large commerical MMO that lacks brutally enforced RP rules" rather than just "result in a satisfactory outcome". In which case, well, duh. I'd still rather be able to build my own tavern/city/whatever somewhere than be able to just suck Goldshire Inn into it's own pocket dimension for an hour.

A fun way to RP in WoW is gimmick characters. Make up a priest, wander into the Goldshire in and start yelling a sermon about the evils of unbridled fornication or what have you. Or a lowbie Stormwind ratcatcher with poor personal hygiene and terrible interpersonal skills. Or a teetotal dwarf. Or a draenei that is secretly two goblins in a mechadranei suit. And so on.

Sure beats all the Thee-ing and Thou-ing half-demon bastard sons of Arthas with glowing purple eyes and a scar on their face.

That's all fine and good, but if you wander into the Goldshire Inn on Moon Guard to sermonize, you better bring protection and/or Lysol.

 :oh_i_see:

Hazmat suit, IMO.

I love that the Moon Guard Goldshire inn exists. I also love that most of the Moon Guardians are all NEVER GO THERE IT WILL EAT YOUR SOUL.

I think that's true of all RP servers.

I was on my Horde server (regular PvE) when someone was mockingly suggesting Kirin Tor for people to join for awesome RP.  I commented about seeing through their evil scheme and then we commiserated about the quality of RP there.

It's true to some degree, but having wandered around on my share of RP servers, Moon Guard's seems to go above and beyond the call of duty. It's almost like it's a server-wide understanding that Goldshire Inn is a send up of all that is wrong with Goldshire Inns everywhere, or a piece of art used to drive off the weak of heart and ensnare the scary people in order to keep the rest of the server safe.

Well shit, now you've got my curiosity up on a day my server's down for 24h.  Moon Guard here I come...

Enforcement of RP for all on the server. #1 by far as to why it often doesn't work since it's too easy for someone to ruin the atmosphere with no repercussions. People who like to be assholes won't stop, you just have to consistently and unwaveringly ban them. If an RP server is materially no different than a non-RP server, what's the point of even pretending to have one.

Persistant changes to a persistant world. RP is about immersion, and how immersive is a come-and-go reality? I mean, how do you continually RP "standing around in a camp waiting for a BG to pop"? Not realistic == not sustainable RP.

Factions, Guild wars, and generally any mechanic that let's you have more than 2 sides (and the same sides) all the time.

Were you doing a lot of RvR?

I very strongly agree with the notion that almost everything going on in Eve is roleplaying.

I played Underlight for a while. Not everyone's cup of tea, but fantastic roleplaying. And yes, it was enforced. If you didn't roleplay, you were invited to leave. It had a lot of other fascinating ideas, like advancement by fiat of other players who were designated as teachers and would craft tasks based on your interest and personality. At the time i was playing, they had just introduced "dreamstrike" a very limited and difficult to learn "art" that resulted in permadeath. I remember being at an overall city meeting and the tension that rippled through when someone who'd "struck" someone the week before (only 2 characters had the ability) walked into the room. I was part of a group that opposed its use or proliferation in any situation and one of our leaders was rumored to be on the chopping block. I also was evangelizing for my pet theory that the "nightmares" (monsters) in the city were actually the souls of people who were dreamstruck.

Generally in games where I've RPed, it's just been playing the game as normal and speaking and acting in character. As time has gone on, I've more and more avoided specific arpee communities as its become little other than a euphemism for cybering. That was always there, but now it seems like it's the only thing left.

Yeah, we routinely had 2 or 3 guild groups running and we'd contribute a lot of bodies to any relic attempt or serious siege campaign. We tended to keep in our own groups in the battle and we still RPed throughout. Sursbrooke was 'our' keep and we kept it claimed for several years, retaking it as necessary.

Was all this on the Euro servers or something?

My DaoC had none of that GM run event stuff.

Yeah, I even remember a Herald post about how they caaaan't do GM run stuff because ... I think it was because people like it too much. Everyone logs in for them and crash the server, people who miss it get all angry they missed it, etc.

Yeah it was all on the Euro servers. We wanted to do it for WAR too but Mythic vetoed that plan.

One of my guildmates in DAOC was constantly in character as an insane lurikeen mage who was obsessed with colors and trophies. It could be quite hilarious at times, especially when housing came out.

The only RPing I remember distinctly, was on one of the official RP servers, some little Lurikeen declared himself the Mayor of Magmell (starter town for Hibernia), and kept in character for like, 5 years or something.


His only character even apparently, that never got past level 6 or something.

I just wish someone one would figure out a way to monetize (even though i hate that word) the NWN concept so players could have the creation tools and be able to build their own worlds, with hosting and oversight by the co you're paying a monthly fee to.  Ideally, the company itself could lead the way with maybe one generic starter world they maintained, as a bootstrap to creation if nothing else, but still alllow players to to take that base concept to mod it to Hades and back.  A company allowing players, or the world builders, control over who is allowed to join their particular world server is a big step in relinquishing control im not sure they would be willing to take, but that's why i think you would have to have at least 1 company run and fully public world to anyone who sub's has something to play while they try to pass the invite requirements to the custom world servers.

Beyond control, the other problem of course is in the whole "how do i make money" part.  Everything about this screams smaller populations and smaller amounts of players.  Making money in mmorpg's today is all about getting big numbers of players.  It would have to be a very different business plan.

I've even wondered if even providing access as a player for one price, and a DM/creator level for a higher monthly price would be worth it.  Not everyone wants to/can create, and by sticking a real cost on it you might filter out some of the more obvious "penis world 2.0" designs people make for shits and giggles in just about any other commonly available toolsets.

Heh, with all the steam sales recently, i've kind of been hoping we eventually see the whole NWN1 suite go up just to get back into that for a while :)

There are still NWN persistent worlds running because there really hasn't been anything better (even NWN 2 didn't match it for a variety of reasons).  Hell the server I used to play on lets see...8 years ago, is still running.  http://lwnsql.lfchosting.com/index.html (and by the looks of it they've even continued to develop their PW).   

Wasn't that Raph's Metaplace? Or am I misremembering?

There seemed to be two tracks in the answers to my question about features that encouraged roleplay. One could be boiled down to "reactivity" (game experiences crafted to meet specific players, persistence of decision results). The other was enforcement of standards. I have a follow up on the latter.

Which do you believe would be more effective:

• A small number of staff GMs with the power to enforce RP at their judgment.
• A coded system that allows the player community as a whole to enforce RP by assigning each other "white marks" and "black marks".

In both cases assume the penalty is being "voted off the island" - the player (account, not a specific character) is booted from the RP server, but gets a free transfer to another server.

Oh - in case anyone was assuming, this is personal curiosity. Nothing related to my day job.

GMs, for sure.  The other is just too susceptible to griefing. 

GMs are a "single point of failure" regards corruption and rash decisions, and their decisions are always angrily questioned. That's why I ask.

Assume a community system would work under something like the following core rules (which I made up):

• A white mark offsets a black mark, and vice-versa.
• Having more than X black marks (after adjustments for white marks) gets you booted.
• A player can only grant one mark (black or white) to a particular player once per month.
• A player can't receive more than Y white marks and Y black marks per day (to prevent lynch mobs).
• Marks expire after one month (because people have good days and bad days).

Stop making rules that limit people's imaginations.  That's how you can design a game that will help foster RP.  Chaotic Evil is not just a Snydley Whiplash accent.

GMs, if they're generally even-handed.

A mark system could be interesting for review, but people are more likely to award negative marks than positive ones, and even with controls it is ripe for abuse.

Indeed, but at least they have some sort of accountability.  Sure, its possible some GM could fly off the handle and ban an entire guild because his wife left him, but the chances are pretty slim, and GMs that do that are either going to 1 ) be fired and replaced or 2) if we are going by the privately owned/run servers model, just aren't going to have anyone playing on their server(s).

Their decisions will by questioned for sure, don't get me wrong, but thats because their decisions CAN be questioned.  Some group gets together and decides they are going to get some guy booted (and if they really want it to happen, a limit on the number of marks per day will only delay, not stop it), there is no recourse that I can see.

Yeah, as far as enforcement goes, only a dedicated and responsive GM staff that constantly patrols will work. The trouble is when you come into differing definitions of roleplay.  You would have to somehow set an entire standard and explain, precisely what the standards of roleplaying are, which would be somewhat difficult.  What about the person who's trying, but really horrible at it and therefore still disruptive to the majority of the players, etc, etc.  It's hard to set solid policies like that.  A private persistent world can just decree by fiat, 'because we say so' but such an attitude would drive customers away from a commercial game, or discourage them from buying in the first place.

As far as monetizing private servers goes, I could see a few ways to do it.  One would be to reduce the cost for creators and DM's based on number of people playing in their area.  So players pay X, DM's pay Y, and that gets reduced by number of people playing in your world or whatever.  This way content creators can be rewarded with reduced fees if their content is popular.

As for actual tools once you're in, I would have it be very much like NWN.  It has to be simple enough that people that aren't good at everything can still make something.  NWN's tile system was one of it's real upsides, because it meant that even though I couldn't make decent terrain if my life depended on it, I can still make a zone by laying down tiles.  This was one of the reasons I never got into NWN2's editing at all.  The editor was so inscrutable to me that I never made anything.  It should have all these complex options, sure, but it also needs defaults that a less experienced person can use simply and easily.

And more than anything, the active DM tools are the most important, in my opinion.  This was one of NWN's bigger failures, in that they never seemed to concentrate much on the DM tools.  They did the editor really well, and they polished up the player client, but the DM client was always buggy and lacked all sorts of common-sense options that a DM needs.  Like being able to see a player's character sheet wasn't a default option for a very long time after it was released.  How can you make a DM client that doesn't have the ability to pull up a character sheet for any player?  I don't see how this could possibly have gotten past any form of testing without being glaringly obvious.  If the DM client is good, the scripting doesn't need to be that good, cause the DM can just do things manually.

"You're in Our World Now."

lol, you just invented "Survivor: The MMO"

I think a weighted marks system might work. Like the player who only marks people once a month is weighted higher than somebody who marks daily.

Why not simply make it a thumbs up-down system? Each character can give every other character a thumbs up (+1) or down (-1.) They are permanent and can be changed at will. Since such a system would track every vote cast, people can be displayed and held accountable and systematic abuse can be proven by a GM.

You can make the thumbs "expire" so that they become a blank vote (+0) after a period of time but giving each player multiple votes is unnecessary. A player that comes back after a long hiatus will thus be at neutral "RP standing."

That's what I described (or tried to describe, anyway). Player A can give Player B a white mark or a black mark once per month. At the end of the month, the mark goes away. Player A can black mark them again, but A can never place more than one mark on B at a time.

Example: Assume 200 black marks are needed to ban a character, and a maximum of 25 black marks and 25 white marks can be accrued per day. In order to ban Player B, Player A would have to organize 199 other players to black mark them - 25 per day for eight days. This assumes no one white marks Player B in that time.

I figured we would go here at some point, and thats kind of why I just say use the GMs in the first place.  Frankly, I honestly can't imagine anyone getting booted from their server NOT appealing.

Yeah, got you. I read it differently, terrible reading comprehension and all that.

I don't think you have to throw any throttles in, since abuse can easily be seen by GMs. GMs should then also have a tool to disable abusing accounts from voting altogether - on anyone. The system would just there as a help and general guide, not a replacement for handling customer reports.

It's a major load on GMs. Bottom line is, I guess, that ANYTHING that informs players of known trolls and power-RPers is a step in the right direction and is likely to improve the overall quality of RP. It doesn't have to be perfect and human intervention at some point is desirable, the system just has to work well enough to filter out a majority of the shit-flinging that happens in RP communities. You're pretty much always a bad RPer to someone.

Is this a bad time to bring up we have a rather large RP contingent in Wurm?

Heck, if you want to make it just so that there are rating theres, then fine, I've got no particular objection I suppose.  But if people can literally be kicked off the server for it, I just don't think it can possibly end well.

A few years ago, I created the following topic, which I think it's somewhat related (only 1 page long, if you want to take a look):

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10986

(in short, I fondly recall the IGM/Seer program in UO with the micro events ran by them).

While it is not feasible in larger, multiple servers games (while I think it could be in games like Fallen Earth), I still think it was the funniest and most immersive/involving (if you managed to ignore the even-destroying crowd) method of creating a nice roplaying environment.
----

For the RP crowd, character customization is quite important:

- Dyes, damnit, let me colour my damn armor pieces with a range of reasonable tones (no neon :P) whenever I want;
- Lots of so called "Social clothing": don't want to look like rambo all the time, everywhere, thanks :P

Also, mini-games, of course in the CONTEXT of that gameworld. I want to go in a inn/cantina/pub whatever and play 1 on 1 social games with other people being able to watch at the same time (let's say, in SWTOR a game of Pazaak), and forget about looting or questing for an entire night if I wish.

Oh, and don't complain :P. We are in a RP nerd thread, so let me nerd :P

Thanks, bye  :awesome_for_real: :heart:

This is absolutely crucial, but it is partly a developer thing and partly a community thing.  It is INCREDIBLY easy to get caught up in the loot hunting game no matter how dedicated to RP you are.  Partly the developers have to make sure that they give the players enough to do besides going chasing after shinies, but you also need a community who is willing to play for other reasons.  I think it is partly this reason that RP is so hard in a game like WoW.  When your game is designed from the ground up as ultimately an item collection game not amount of inns with chairs you can sit at and tuxedo/dress craftables will make up for it.

Heh.  That was the promise of Metaplace but the reality...let's just be kind and say it fell rather short.  :oh_i_see:
I'd settle for an updated NWN1 with an improved toolset, built from the ground up for persistant world designers, and a better DM management suite (and i agree that NWN2 was actually a step backwards.  Sadly, Bioware seems to be moving in the opposite direction considering the path from NWN1 to NWN2 to Dragon Age...).  As Koyasha is right, a good set of DM tools actually reduces the need for the sort of in depth world building that is quite frankly harder for most people.  After all, what's more effort? Writing pages of dialogue to handle a variety of player responses and situations, or controlling the NPC and just talking back to the players?  And that's just one mob.

One thing i seem to remeber from NWN1 is a sort of DM to player group matchmaking system where you could find DM's advertising running "module x" and looking for players to sign up and schedule times.  This included rating systems for both players, DMs and the modules themselves.  It was completely outsite "offical" NWN1 but i think that would be a large step closer to the pnp style rpg sessions people would lke to see.  Lets face it, most DM's did NOT create them own modules and adventures; that doesnt mean they couldnt run a fun session as DM. 

It still amazing to look back at how far the NWN1 community took that appalication, warts and all, and made it work for themselves.
At this point, if i can track down all my cd's, i may install it again and tool around the persistant worlds still out there.

I was part of a group that played together twice weekly in an ongoing campaign that was run like that.  It was great fun, very different from a persistent world of course, but more like a virtual traditional D&D game.  The DM that was running it was constantly updating things and so forth to reflect what the group had done.  The game world was incredibly bare bones, and he just spawned things in as needed, if I recall correctly, which is really the only viable way to do it when you are working on a project that scale as a single person.  Still, even though most of the world seemed a little empty, it worked.

edit: I think that place was called neverwinter connections

Give a population the game tools to decide for themselves PvP alliances, factions and criminal tagging, if you want a self-policing and population-relative mechanism with no "one right answer". The game fabric itself must provide some of this.

1. Alliances. Multiple guilds can ally, and a guild or alliance can formally control a town, city or other interesting areas. This is critical for the game itself to support this, otherwise you just have a player-imposed convention (like The Venture Company server in WoW) for world PvP, which while fun certainly isn't the basis for fancier impact.

2. Voting (thumbs, marks, whatever) by characters, which add up into guild and faction character consensus, which can then be applied in lots of ways if guilds or factions control towns, cities and regions. Think of all the WoW Contested and faction mechanisms, but with player-effected impact and the ability to formally claim control like DAoC. In Outland, WoW started dabbling with some fun stuff like the Hellfire stadiums, Zangarmarsh fort control, Terrokar towers and Nagrand's Halaas. Extend that across the enitre game.

3. Real tangible penalties based on this.

- guilds can control towns, cities and even certain regions, and set the guild faction consensus of that area's NPCs to their own if desired. This creates a great dynamic to the game; every time you login, the world may have changed (or need effort to change back).
- elevate guild factions to that seens for NPC factions and their affects on the various merchant, transportation options and guard KOS rules which an area's NPCs abide by.
- increasing the aggro radius the worse a character's standing becomes with said guild or faction (the guards may run at you from 100 yards away if you are really hated, more like the aggro radius of WoW Open Beta when you were +/- 20 levels to mobs).
- increasing the guild or regional messages and their details about where a particularly bad apple is located when in your area.
- decreasing chat access for criminals.
- the Most Wanted 10 are given the honor of being mapped in real-time (like a WoW quest NPC) for retribution, or perhaps NPC bounty hunter teams are increasingly deployed at a bad apple when in the area.
- the cream of the criminal crop get their own Wanted posters and bounty rewards.
- skills such as stealth, speed and flight may be penalized when you rank as extremely hostile to the controlling guild or faction.

These are general voting and guild/faction dynamics for PvP and by extension criminality situations like RP violators (or whatever else the server population deems unfit). It is up to the player base on a given server to do something about it given the tools.

- In non-PvP, perhaps only crime factions whose standing is controlled via all the voting and such are valid for the above. These are the ones you use to punish players who are consensus bad apples relative to the world, area or town population.

- In a PvP setting, add the playable factions also as candidates for these alliance mechanisms.

Erie Isle in second life has a real nice set of gm's and it seems to work well enough for them. But it has people from Second Life.

Just like any other system, you would have to take steps to balance it to prevent not just abuse, but people gaming it.  For example, making the marks track by account rather than by character, preventing trial accounts from using it, etc etc.

I'd prefer to see a more validated system where you rate both players and dm's on scale of 1-10 but have to provite at least 2 intelligent sentences of commentary as to why and make that part of the characters public available profile on the matchmaking part.  That would require something like a community rep to review the comments, but still again, you're looking for more han just a number: "+10 this dude rocks!" it just useless as "1, he sux, we all died".  You need a little more than that.

Gentlemen, behold - Roleplay! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiqAFeMAbb4
(Genuine RP profile from WoW).

So you want GMs to be able to enforce that in a ruleset? Good luck.  :awesome_for_real:

Whatever, backstories have nothing to do with anything.  Seriously, I mean, that was shitty sure, but it little to nothing to do with game mechanics supporting RP.

"He left her, and became a Death Knight." :awesome_for_real:

I'm trying to find some concordance on mechanisms that encourage people to speak and act in character. Like Mal said, character backstory has little to do with that - unless it actually has some effect on what the player does or says in the game.

We've wandered on off the enforcement angle, because it's easy to come up with tangible systems for that. But if I can reorient the conversation for a moment, does anyone have any other ideas for systems or features that can passively encourage people to behave IC, rather than punish them for going OOC?

World reactivity and persistence of decisions have been mentioned in various ways. Pulling from Sam's tale of sleeping her way to 80, do in-game mechanics for players marrying (UO) and adopting one another (LotRO) add anything?

I'll use EVE as an example here.

So imagine this conversation in EVE on corp chat:

"Hey everyone, I'm in Jita at the moment, some good deals on mods here, anyone need a Mining Mindlink?"
"Ah, I could probably use one, how much are they going for"
"About 20M ISK, want me to pick one up for you?"
"Hmm, nah, can't quite afford that right now"
"Alright, I'll be back to our system in an hour, gonna let auto pilot take me home"


So, is that in character or out of character?   When player goals = character goals, there is almost no distinction in my opinion.  To me thats how you get people who don't even think about RP to act "in character."

In WoW, you character's goal is to save the town, or kill the lich king, or win the argent tournament.   Your goals for those are "finish this questline so I can level up, complete my tier 10 set, or do my dailies for today."  Its just damn hard to promote RP when there is a big gulf between character and player in terms of motivations and goals.

Yeah, you had the same thing in UO back when the default method for getting more armor was visiting a player blacksmith. Insert some ASCII penises and Family Guy references and "LOOL WTF ROFL LAAAG!1!!" as background chatter, though, and the effect is somewhat blunted.

Also, I can't believe you guys suggested a mechanism for letting roleplayers kick people off a server. The idea that roleplayers are more mature than your average MMO jacktard is a myth. They're usually better-spoken, but they tend to be more cliquish and petty than middle school girls.

Yeah, what I mentioned certainly doesn't stop the overtly out of character/nothing at all to do with the game unfortunately, but at least it does encourage players, when actually playing the game or talking about the game, to generally be in character without even paying any special attention to it.   

Unfortunately, stopping people from being idiots (penises, all caps yelling about what is on TV, etc) is, in my opinion, a separate issue than using game mechanics to encourage role play.  Its more of a "stop being from being asshats" issue, which may be impossible besides having very heavy handed mods.

I suggested it, but it wasn't because I think roleplayers are more mature.

I believe a roleplaying server should be... for roleplayers (shocking, I know). I've never seen an RP server that didn't have the usual group of k3w1 d3wdz gumming up the chat channels. Though I'm too cynical too fully buy it, I also want to believe that given the proper tools, players can police themselves according to community standards. If they want to be jacktards to each other for using "thou" wrong, that's their bag, but the reason I brought it up was to give RP'ers a tool to remove non-RP'ers themselves.

Your RP server is going to have an organized alliance of guilds who dedicate themselves to voting away trolls and putting on events and shit, led by the usual petty power-hungry dipshits. Then another organization is going to crop up because a bunch of people are sick of listening to the first group, or somebody got caught cybering somebody else's wife, or whatever.

Then one of those groups is going to have that guy who they think is hilarious and everyone else hates, and he's going to rack up enough thumbs down votes to get thrown off the server. Sure it's because he was running around spamming "penis penis balls penis" on an alt at 3 in the morning, but he's not gonna tell anyone that. No, it was that other community that hates us and is jealous of us and is trying to bring us down! They did it!

Cue the two groups making big shows of pretending to be unable to hear/see each other and having downvote wars and generally being giant assholes.

Enforce RP on your RP servers yourself or don't bother having them. You don't even need an army of GMs to do it. You just need to make the GMs you have actually punish kewldood trolls whenever the report finally gets to them. Not ignore it, ala Blizzard.

If you want a mass market game to have an RP server, charge extra for it. That'll solve 90% of your problems because nobody will cough up an extra buck unless they care about RP. Not just the kewlios, but also the people who's cousin Bill plays there, the people who like its name and think they have a right, and so on.

Add a buck to the subscription, hire an intern, and police RP. Three strikes or request and you're moved to another server.

Oh and start it two weeks after the initial release.

See?  WUA understands that what Stormwatlz invented "Survivor: Online and In Character".  Want to stay on this server?  Good, how much clique can you suck?

Yes please.

Preferably also not listing it as the top recommendation for "low-pop server, start your character here" that everyone sees.  I'm looking at you, WoW.

The best RP is non-intentional RP and for me, as usual, that occured in WW2O back around 2003 I believe.  It was a very VOIP-oriented game back then and if you were a bystander popping in and listening to squad chatter, you'd think you were really at War.  You get this similar feel in Eve I guess.

A big function of it is that it's obvious that "ordinary chatter" largely has no place in the game and can indeed gimp the side that's not as focused in their comms.  This creates an automatic "RP" mechanic since the RP is an integral part of the game.  Another game I could say this worked well in was ArmedAssault (in a big map on a large campaign) and a well organized Falcon4.0 campaign.  In these games, there's no room to screw around.

In a non-sim sense, of course I'd agree that SWG offered the best RP opportunities.  I remember RPing all kinds of shit in that game and most of the time these werent even organized events, just happened.  The best scenario I remember though was a citywide event to find someone's murderer (the murdered person was basically someone who'd unsubbed i think)... there were clues and informants scattered all about and you had to piece together the puzzle to find the killer.  Twas an excellent minigame.  I didnt finish it but I remember locating one informant and paying a hot purple TwiLek to dance for him so his toungue would loosen.  The reward was substantial of course and I believe you also gained a special tag/clothes as a city sheriff or something.

Just out of curiosity, how many folks' PnP role-playing included a mandate that you always speak in character and never go OOC?  I certainly never saw that outside of LARP events.  Rather a typical gaming session would generally wander back and forth between intense in-character "episodes" and "hey, pizza's here, who got the half with green olives?"  The key thing was, being a small group in a room together allowed for everyone knowing which was which, and feeling the flow as it changed.  The problem with an MMO is that the massive part guarantees that there is almost always somebody OOC at any given time disrupting the mood and distracting everyone else,  AND the lack of non-text cues makes it that much harder to get and stay in character, especially for those with less-developed role-playing skills. 

So the two main things that need to be addressed are keeping the group small (and providing a multitude of tools for self-policing) and improving/increasing the transmission and feedback mechanisms between players.  Instancing and grouping and guilds and having ignore lists and all chat channels being ignorable and user-created/moderated channels all address the first.  But the second is much much harder.  Having the world be more interactive is a small step in the right direction.  Things like being able to sit or lie on *anything*, pick up anything, break anything breakable, etc, would all help.  Stupid shit like invisible walls, getting stuck on a 1-inch barrier, being unable to push through a clump of grass, and not being able to jump over that small clump of grass all have to be eliminated.

But I think the real key to sucking people into their characters is going to be the characters themselves.  That onscreen mass of pixels needs to do what I tell it to do AND the world needs to react to it appropriately.  When I throw a punch at someone, if I hit the punch needs to hit ONSCREEN and rock them back accordingly, and NOT pass right through them. When I'm angry, my avatar needs to look angry, and I need to be able to define what that looks like, within reason, as well as control when it displays it easily. 

LOS needs to be measured from my avatar's eyes to ANY visible part of my target.  Solid things in the game need to be solid, whether they are characters and npcs or chairs or walls or whatever.  My character's arm should never pass through my hip much less the wall next to me, and the hilt of the sword on my back should not rest in the center of my skull.

Third-person perspective needs to go away, meaning peripheral vision and the sensation of touch need to somehow be translated into the UI.  And no, I don't want to actually feel the dagger slipping between my ribs, but it must somehow be made obvious on-screen that I've just been hit in the back, and I should easily be able to turn towards that attack (provided I'm not impaled on a huge spike or something ;).  EQ1 was the first and last MMO I'm aware of where it was actually possible to play in first person perspective.  That was a combination of combat being slow enough that you had time to read and react to the text telling you that you had been hit in the back, plus the audio in it truly gave you the clues you needed to realize that giant was coming up behind you, if you were paying attention.

Probably most importantly but perhaps slightly easier, if you want me to play your game in character, make your game react to me in character!  If I swing my sword around in a tavern people need to be moving out of the way and/or drawing theirs.  Automagic knowledge of everything my character has ever done, even in a closed room at the bottom of otherwise empty catacombs buried under a pyramid in the middle of an uninhabited desert, needs to be done away with.  If an npc sees me, unless they have reason to know ME by sight (wanted posters or prior encounters or something), they should react according to what they see, NOT the game's punch list of all my accomplishments/bad deeds.  That doesn't mean an orc in his fortress wouldn't attack a human on sight, but it MIGHT mean that if I talk to him in orcish he MIGHT pause his attack, even if I just killed the two guards outside his room, provided I did so silently so he had no way of KNOWING that I killed them!

But I guess you're looking for practical ideas, eh?  OK, how about this.  Take the emote system and merge it with the chat system in a thorough fashion, so that if I type something like "*glares why did you do that" my avatar actually glares at whoever I'm looking at while mouthing the words.  Bits and pieces of that have been implemented in various places, most notably second life.  But never in a game with a comprehensive set of commands that could be easily integrated with the chat.

And forget about global chat ever being very RP friendly in an MMO.  Unless you want to somehow enforce role-playing a world where hundreds of people can hear each other talking in their heads no matter how remote they are in the gameworld, and new people randomly join while others randomly exit this strange shared telepathic gestalt.  :awesome_for_real:

My PnP group generally just used our real names when talking about character action.

I remember watching an extremely awkward game where the GM forced players to only use character names, which saw a group of near strangers constantly have to remember who was Angmar the Dwarf as well as their real names. Having the GM doing the equivalent of, "ROLEPLAY, DAMMIT!" didn't help the game flow.

As discussed, the more closely aligned a player objective is to their character objective, the easier it is to play a character. Enforced roleplay only works in small groups where that cultural standard can be reinforced - as soon as you go bigger, you have to deal with the Hardcore ("Yea verily, fair maid. Canst thou tellst me where yon market ist?"), the Softcore ("Hey, where's the market? I need to sell some loot") and the Just Plain Odd ("My character is a dark elf who's been polymorphed into a dog - meet Rizzt Ro'Rundren").

I started writing a wall-o-text on what you could do to better shoehorn RP into current games, but gave it up as a) something we've all heard before and b) irrelevent.  Pen and Paper Role playing games are about shared storytelling experiences making meaningful choices with a like minded group of people.  MMORPG's are a whole other animal; what constantly fools people into expecting one be like the other is their common heritage.  Sure, they might have similar settings and game systems, but their differences are more profound.  Personally, i would stop trying to shoehorn RP into an foreign environment rather than build a system that actually supports it from the ground up.  Course, PnP games make their money on book, module and supplement sales but beyond the initial book investment, players can create their own adventures forever more.  MMO's are 24/7 services for a flat monthly fee. Different business model, different target audiences, and way different systems designs.  Contrast and compare things like combat frequency, pace, importance, outcomes and benefits in a PnP session to a MMO.  Or non-combat activities (be they questing or not).  Or world design with things like travel time, geographic consequences, local economy, law enforcement, etc.  Or base character creation, advancement and development, and equipment vs character.  

One is like the bizzaro universe of the other.  Or Anti-matter and matter.

The one RP story that sticks out in my mind the most was finding out in EQ2 (antonious bayle server) that freeport had a whole sex slave market that RP'ers ran. Aside from that I always enjoyed the UO events and catching a few in-character people in CoX, UO, SWG, and EQ2 which gave the game a bit more of a living quality.

SWG and UO probably had the most open RP I've seen but I think the game mechanics sort of encouraged it. For SWG I had cantina downtime, and for UO pretty much the whole loot economy was done through crafters and player towns. UO imo was largely successful at it due to the game having really no end-game and instead a persistent world with a lot of different ways to engage it. As far building a dynamic RP server I would be interested to see something like crafting skills being designated to certain roles in the game. For example PVP, PVE, and RP characters having unique crafting professions that can benefit the other two.

My favorite RP experience in an MMO was in Dark Age of Camelot, where I belonged to an RP guild on Midgard.

I played a skald whose backstory was that she'd murdered her husband and most of her male relatives at a dinner one night after getting them drunk. The reason was that she'd been forced to marry him by her cruel and politically ambitious father, who was constantly scheming for more power. She was genuinely in love with a younger man from a nearby clan and refused the marriage until her father told her that he'd have her lover killed if she didn't obey. So she gave in to spare his life. But a few months later, the husband killed the lover anyway when he happened to run across him at the crossroads. Hence the skald taking her vengeance. But her father escaped. So she was a sort of doomed, depressed figure who lived mostly for the possibility of catching up with her father and killing him. Basically, the kind of thing that happens in most Norse sagas, with a bit of a feminist twist.

So I did a lot of the "mysterious past" stuff, and played the character as bleak and fatalistic. Was really fun. When I decided to unsub many moons later, the whole guild set up a tinystory where the skald got to track down her father--we picked one of the Midgard NPCs, the boss of this fort off in the woods, and went all over the zone doing our own "quest". Eventually some other players started following us because we were talking the whole thing out, and a few players started playing as if they were the evil father's henchmen trying to stop us.

That would be awesome. Right up until the SA Goons invade your game. It took me all of four seconds to think of thathappening, so I'm sure they'll be around the second it goes live.

I think this is basically spot on. But then notice that the issue really is that for RP to align with the game, the game MUST be its nature be very "world-like", open-ended, with a lot of dynamic content. There is no way to align character and objectives if your objectives are the same objectives that everyone else on server has. It isn't just "gotta finish my tier 10 set" that's the issue. It's that as I run a bunch of WoW quests, the gameworld doesn't react at ALL to the history or nature of my character. If I show up as a level 80 undead rogue in Mulgore and decide to run a quest in the lowbie village, the game treats me just as if I'm a level 1 tauren hunter. Levelling to 80 in Northrend as a Horde member, you end up helping the Apothecary fuckers to kill people at the Wrathgate, you end up invading Undercity to get the Apothecary fuckers (with no one upbraiding you for helping them get what they needed), and then a bit later you end up going all over the fucking world to help rescue a dying paladin from becoming undead--even if  you ARE undead. Forget WoW's lore: the "story" of every single character consists of near-random oscillations from cynical brutality to Jesus-like compassion, from being the lickspittle brow-beaten gofer of shitheads who aren't fit to wipe your ass to going toe-to-toe with gods (and then going back to being a gofer again).

You can never make RP in a MMO really really work until you have a dynamic world with branching choices of some kind.

It doesn't take much. Most of my favorite roleplaying moments come from City of Heroes because superheroes are so inherently silly that it was easy to make up backstories on the fly, and when they ran into somebody who was roleplaying they just went along with it. It was fun and easy and didn't interfere with gameplay (which was also fun and easy). Phrasing needs and interests in In-Character ways didn't get in the way of understanding what was going on. Like the EVE example, but slightly less mundane.

In Dark Age of Camelot (an item collection game, and more tactically complex and thus less RP friendly) I played a Spirit Master specifically because I liked the class backstory. They were (are?) a pet class who summoned the ghosts of those who had died in ordinary, non-combat ways so that they had another chance to die in battle and go to Valhalla. Every time you summoned a pet it would look different. When in groups with other people I would tell the other players that ghost's name and explain his or her cause of death. Then if the pet died (which happened distressingly frequently... it wasn't particularly capable, and the class kind of sucked), I would take a moment to note the happy occasion before introducing somebody new.

The number of players in my groups who would start spontaneously roleplaying their own characters' reactions (listing family members who had died in similar ways and their sincere appreciation of the important work priests of Hel do) was striking. These games are more fun when there's a story to them.

Forward:Curse of Harperella (http://my.lotro.com/beschutzer/2010/07/19/forwardcurse-of-harperella/)

Rather cool story of how a LOTRO RP event turned into a machinima.

Small world, I know Harperella on the Lord of the Rings Online Landroval server, just saw that video yesterday.  Furthermore, I was in Paelos' guild in DAOC (Boarshead), and I remember our mutual lurikeen mage friend quite well. 

As you can see from the video, RP is quite vibrant on our LOTRO server.  My own kinship, Hobbiton Philharmonic, is a music band playing everything from "traditional" medieval music to our own versions of modern pop and metal.  Harperella actually organized Weatherstock, the largest festival in LOTRO history, with several hundred participants.  Might as well brag that our band won the crowd popularity prize  :grin:  It was a ton of fun playing for a huge crowd, right on top of Weathertop, the hill where Frodo got cut by the Nazgul.  Harperella's kinship even organized guards to keep down the local monsters, so that any low-level players could attend in that unsafe location.

Besides the music thing, there are a ton of roleplay kinships on Landroval.  My own kinship mainly does what I'd call "light RP" in the context of the music, making up backstories and even lyrics to go with the songs.  Others get more serious and act out elaborate stories, many centered around the town of Bree.

It's interesting to hear about roleplay on DAOC's European servers.  I wish we'd had those kind of events on the US servers.  Personally I didn't really RP there, beyond getting into "realm pride" for RVR.  Like another poster, my guild tried to hold "our" keep in the frontier, and tried to RvR together.  But you just didn't see the kind of RP that I see in LOTRO, largely I think because DAOC didn't have the kind of rich backstory provided by Tolkien.

DAOC could have had that much backstory and more had Mythic bothered to put even a little of it in, it isn't like the source material was lacking.

Instead we got obstacle courses in Atlantis, plant people, and freaking corn and pumpkins in our housing art.  :angryfist:

I thought this was somewhat relevant.   The GM (edit: ex GM, he stepped down and let someone else take over due to real life stuff, forgot about that) of my old WoW guild is holding an RP event to give away Uther's Tabard.  Earthen Ring is an RP server, and though most people don't take it seriously there are a lot of people who came as RPers who later turned to raiding simply because WoW turned out to be a crap game for RP.  This sort of thing is about the very best you can do in a game like WoW, and like I've said before (maybe here, i don't remember), you could effectively do all of it in a chat room with the same result.  


http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25026666647&sid=1

Ahahaha, I fuckin' TOLD you people Moon Guard's Goldshire was extra special (http://www.wow.com/2010/08/04/blizzard-to-patrol-moon-guards-goldshire-for-harassment-erotic/)!

Follow up to the Moon Guard thing: The GM's apparently decided to nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure summon L80 elite demons into the inn because there was basically too much 'roleplaying' to police.

No, really.

Summoning Satans to drive away prostitutes?  :grin: